The Architecture of Seduction: An Analysis on Digital Architectures within Consumer Society

Currently new digital tools used in architecture are often at the service of a conception of architecture as a consumer society���s cultural good. Within this neoliberal cultural frame, architects��� social function is no longer seen as the production of urban facts with sense of duty, but as a part within the symbolic logic that rules the social production of cultural values as it was defined by Veblen and developed by Baudrillard. As a result, the potential given by the new digital tools used in representation has shifted from an instrument used to verify a built project to two different main models: At the one hand the development of pure virtual architectures that are exclusively configured within their symbolic value as artistic ���images��� easily reproducible. On the other hand the development of all those projects which -even maintaining their attention to architecture as a built fact- base their symbolic value on the author���s image and on virtual aesthetics and logics that prevail over architecture���s materiality. Architects��� sense of duty has definitely reached a turning point.